LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! - Amodern 15-04-21 8:50 AM

LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! - Amodern 15-04-21 8:50 AM Amodern 4: The Poetry Series LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! Jackson Mac Low's Phonopoetics Michael Nardone Cogs & cogs that cannot turn to recognitions: such dogs in the dark noonday! As if the tongue told & tolled Among the melancholic arcades. Where the moods advance toward the modes. Time to try the knot, the Not Or to be caught Forever in the nerve-traceries of Beauty… Unstrung, the structure is sound. –Andrew Joron, “Mazed Interior” [1] I begin with “Mazed Interior” because the interplay of sounds and meanings in Joron’s poem – the resonant shift from “told” to “tolled,” “the knot” before “the Not,” the mechanisms of individual recognitions advancing toward utterance, moods molding into modes – opens up a space to hear Jackson Mac Low, his “simultaneities,” his “word event,” and, with Mac Low, approach the architectonics of noise his works make audible. Unstrung, the structure is sound. Here, one comes to sound as noun, sonus, an utterance, but one “unstrung,” sent forth to reflect, refract, echo and overlap, from all and in all directions, amid an architecture, within the ear. It is a structured, yet fugitive sound – as Edison termed it listening to his new invention, that captivator of noise, the phonograph. [2] There, too, is another sense of sound: sound as adjective, from the Old English- Germanic gesund, health or healthiness, free from defect, as in of sound mind, sensible, sound judgment, of substantial or enduring character, as in: this unstrung structure, as such, will hold, shall persist. It is from within these protean constructions of sound and sense that I want to begin this listening of Mac Low’s 1971 performance at Sir George Williams University (SGWU) in Montreal. The earliest recording of a performance presently available by the American poet, composer, and multimedia performance artist, the 1971 phonotext presents an entirely undocumented mode of Mac Lowian composition. No other recording of Mac Low captures the breadth of his compositions from the http://amodern.net/article/listen-listen-listen/ Page 1 of 19 LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! - Amodern 15-04-21 8:50 AM mid-1950s through to the early 1970s, and no other presents his extensive use of phonotextual materials in performance. In this essay, I trace out these undocumented aspects of Mac Low’s phonopoetics through a close listening of the performance that always keeps in mind the wider contexts in and through which these compositions make noise. Here, I pursue the ways in which Mac Low’s sonic architectures resonate aspects of his moment’s soundscape – of the Vietnam War, counter-cultures, mass protests and mass media – as he performs a “critical remixing” [3] of his own personal archive of sounds. Widely recognized for systematic chance-operated works and deterministic non-intentional compositional methods, Mac Low explored throughout his life a number of text-generative tactics: scores for happenings, Fluxus-styled language events, diastics, and other chance operations governed by tools such as the I Ching, action cards and dice. Steve McCaffery writes: Mac Low’s systematic-chance-generated compositions impress most perhaps in their consistent emergence out of a variety of austere programs that emphasize the traditionally negative or countervalues in writing: semic dissonance, grammatical transgression, the elimination of a conscious intention, the removal of the writer as a centered subject responsible for the text it “writes,” a suspension of the word’s instrumental functions, and a provoked absence of the subject from the productive aspect of semantic agency. [4] Ron Silliman suggests that the aleatoric compositions for which Mac Low is largely known make up a smaller part of Mac Low’s overall importance. As Silliman explains, “Mac Low was more or less alone in the 1950s in his explorations of poetic form as system (to my mind a far more important implication of his work than his use of chance operations, which are merely one type of system).” [5] Charles Bernstein, noting Mac Low’s “architectural imagination,” considers these systematic explorations as “a practical catalogue of what writing can do.” Bernstein continues: In effect, his work has broadened the possibilities of the medium, and as a result what can be done with it, by turning up syntactic patterns and textures that a less systematic and more traditionally expressive writing practice could not have. In the end, new terrains are made not just for structural and programmatic writing but for all writing and all reading. [6] Entering upon “new terrains,” Bernstein’s discussion of Mac Low’s compositional experimentation switches its architectural analogy for an ecological one. Bernstein writes: I think this may help explain why Mac Low’s voluminous persistence is so crucial to his project, even in the face of a reader’s exasperation at the “unevenness” of the work, his refusal to “edit” out the “best.” Such an idea would presumably strike Mac Low as oddly as it would a natural historian criticized for gathering too many specimens. (Note, in this regard, Mac Low’s meticulous insistence on documenting the system, conditions, and time of each work: a framing that suggests what his sense of a text is.) Indeed, Mac Low can be seen as a natural historian of language, investigating the qualities and properties of human being’s most shared substance. http://amodern.net/article/listen-listen-listen/ Page 2 of 19 LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! - Amodern 15-04-21 8:50 AM [7] These considerations of Mac Low’s textual production provide the ground for the sonic dimensions of his compositional practice that I will consider in detail. “The sound stratum of poetry,” writes Reuven Tsur, “is a continuous embarrassment for many literary critics.” [8] Though I would argue there has been a significant shift in terms of attention to phonopoetical concerns even in the short span of time since Tsur’s statement was published in 2007, to a great extent his criticism continues to be true. Even though Charles Bernstein, as Louis Cabri writes, has been “largely responsible for the re-emergence of sound as a value for critical attention” [9] in poetry and poetics throughout the last two decades, critical approaches to the phonotextual literary object remain largely unexplored. Even a poet like Mac Low, for whom sound was central to his sense of composition as a poet and composer, has had surprisingly little consideration given to the sonic aspects of his works in performance. The writings of Hélène Aji and Tyrus Miller are exceptions. Aji indirectly picks up on the architectural and ecological metaphors Bernstein developed above. She first notes the “architectural polyvalence” in the way Mac Low structures language to function in his poems, then focuses on the “transpersonal experience” of the poems’ performances. [10] In outlining the intricate relationship between the page-text, the performed-text, the performers and the space of performance, Aji writes: The specificity of Mac Low’s practice lies in the way he bases his work on the conception and execution of installations and processes that are not confined to their textual, visual, or musical dimensions but rather aim to redefine the poem as the integrated coexistence of all three dimensions to form the complete work. [11] Mac Low creates structures, architectures, installations – yet they are processual, provisional, their materials perpetually shifting toward “integrated coexistence” with themselves and their surround. Tyrus Miller focuses upon the evental or situational aspects of Mac Low’s repertoire, and notes how Mac Low’s works in performance represent what Nicholas Bourriaud called a “social interstice,” a special, temporal site in the “arena of representational commerce” and a duration “whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed on us.” [12] In describing and theorizing the performative, intersubjective, political and paragrammic aspects of Mac Low’s oeuvre, Miller outlines how Mac Low “evolves a vast array of procedures to rotate fields of language” and how his “poetic procedures branch in several directions at once, offering the results as singular examples of a way of shuttling between language and the forms of life: a practical demonstration of how free critical and creative activity might be addressed to its environment.” [13] Yet, despite the great care with which Aji and Miller articulate the performative and evental aspects of Mac Low’s repertoire (thereby always incorporating the stratum of sound), neither writer actually listens to the works. When Aji and Miller discuss the sounded elements of Mac Low’s works, they rely solely upon the scores for performance or other paraperformative materials: either the poem-text or the instructions for performance or reflections upon these texts. The omission of the phonotext in their work exposes a critical limit in textual scholarship as being unfit to engage the polvalent or pluriform qualities of a poetic work in performance. Each time Aji and Miller discuss sound in Mac Low’s works, they are writing about an abstraction of http://amodern.net/article/listen-listen-listen/ Page 3 of 19 LISTEN! LISTEN! LISTEN! - Amodern 15-04-21 8:50 AM sound based upon what Mac Low intended as author and composer. Additionally, for all of the attention that Aji and Miller give to the specificity of Mac Low’s instructions for performance, they willfully ignore the imperative Mac Low pronounced on numerous occasions to be his primary admonition: “Listen! Listen! Listen!” Mac Low, as much as any other North American poet of the latter half of the 20th century, deserves such a close listening. If anything, his unique sense of composition has always invited this participation, this kind of listening.

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